


Tel'abelas

by firjii



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Other, Painting, Solavellan Angst, flashfiction, post-trespasser events, safe for everyone who doesn't mind a pinch of mild swearing, solavellan flashfic, the rotunda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-06 03:03:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12808209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firjii/pseuds/firjii
Summary: Some time after disbanding the Inquisition, Lavellan returns to Skyhold and finally says goodbye to Solas by visiting the rotunda and leaving her own sort of mark among Solas' frescoes.





	Tel'abelas

Her steps were inordinately small and slow as she scaled the stairs. No matter. It wouldn’t take long. Dorian stayed close. Once she was inside, she lingered by the hearth just inches from the door. She watched the humble flames intently for a moment. Dorian only waited. He owed her this much after what she had done to help him break from his past. Gentle echoes of chatter – contacts or scouts or cooks who were still too devoted to their work to fully understand that their days here were perhaps a little more measured now, if not numbered – put both of them into a soothing lull for awhile.

She suddenly wagged her head, as if actively shaking a swamp fog away. Her slender arm barely managed to force the door open; Vivienne’s inconceivably brilliant magic had given her a flesh-like prosthetic that was both useful and comfortable –  almost as natural as a real limb, including the new hand – but Lavellan often still forgot to coordinate it with her real limb. The door creaked and groaned with the same stubborn stiffness it had shown when they’d first settled Skyhold. No one had oiled the hinges since he’d left. No one had dared. It was _his_ room, even if he would never set foot in it again.

The rotunda still hummed with the mild odors of paint, plaster, pigments – any number of other materials whose uses had baffled the quartermaster when Solas had requested them. A few messenger birds still resided high above in the rookery, as evidenced by the occasional leaving now splattered on the foreboding frescoes.

There were a few moldering tomes and jars on the table, now rather dusty. Most everything in the room was dusty now. Not even she had been to the rotunda more often than she’d needed to since he had disappeared. Now, the room was doubly imposing. The frescoes seemed even vaster, as if they might tumble down from the walls and smother her at any moment. Her arms remained clenched motionlessly near her torso, her hands ominous fists. Her breathing rose until the slightest wheeze rippled out in the open space.

Dorian put a light hand on her shoulder. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

The instant he spoke, she drew in a cavernous but ragged sniffle. “No,” she rumbled brokenly. She made a sweeping glance around the room twice. She swallowed equally cavernously. “But I _need_ to.”

She’d never painted in front of Solas. She’d watched him work whenever his back was turned – even tried to mix pigments when she’d noted interesting ones – but she’d never brought herself to asking him for lessons. He’d always been a different man when he’d painted. She’d only ever basked in the fringes of that other presence, too startled by the strange mixture of impulse and peace to understand how to properly make contact with it – to make it her own. 

She opened a bottle of watery, stagnant pigments – green, formerly her favorite color – and clumsily dipped a rag in it. She blotted it over a corner of his unfinished panel – damn him, the one story he’d left unspoken. The green was stark against the great slabs of white.

Most of the paints were flimsy and insubstantial, a necessity for the work he’d spent so many hours on. She spied a squatty jar of a thick black substance, perhaps not actually intended for painting and somehow only left there by accident. The substance inside was scarcely thinner than pitch, but it would have to do. There were at least twenty different brushes on the table. She chose one at random.

Her fingers contorted strangely around the long, slender handle. Her hand clasped it firmly, but her wrist shook, like a child only just learning to read. As it was, she could barely spell the precious words, the result of willfulness against her own Keeper in her formative years. Between her lack of experience with the tool and the limited remaining paint, she needed to gouge each line and curve on the wall multiple times. More than once, she needed to stop to wipe her cheeks or squeeze her arm into submission. When the curls and jabs resembled words, she took a single step back and considered it blankly.

The two stood in perfect silence for ten minutes or more. Dorian cleared his throat as quietly as possible. “Is it done?” he managed in warm but careful tones.

She stepped back absentmindedly. “Yes,” she murmured. She suddenly spun around and replaced the materials on the table gruffly, clanging the glass indiscriminately against ceramic and other glass. She swiped a hand hard all around her reddening face. “It’s done.” Her voice was as sharp as an ice shard. She made tight, bouncy steps that only further emphasized how profoundly amiss the day was. “Thank you for coming with me,” she mumbled as she made for the door.

“Then you should –” he trailed off tenuously. He winced, as if expecting her to use defensive magic on him for the mere inconvenience of his conversation.

She stopped, her shoulders alert but patient.

He swallowed. “You should sign it.”

She glanced over her shoulder to the lettering. “No.”

“Others might want to know that the Inquisitor was here – _here_ , I mean.”

“I’m not the Inquisitor anymore.”

“We set out to find and defeat a threat. It didn’t take long to see how wrong we were. As far as I’m concerned, our work is ongoing. We don’t need an Inquisition in name to follow its principles.” 

She hesitated, her face a vacillating storm despite its temporary composure.

He shrugged minutely. “They might still want to see where you made your mark.”

She snorted weakly. A mild sneer came unbidden. “Look around you, Dorian. I made my mark everywhere. I don’t need paint to prove that. No one needs to see it on a wall.”

His forehead smoothed as his mouth pinched tighter into a grimace – just a small one. “It’s a way to show that something’s finished. Every culture would say the same.”

“No one else here would write the People’s words down. Even Solas –” Her throat crimped at the use of his name. “It’s obvious enough.”

“You don’t like to leave things unresolved. I’ve seen it time and again.”

Inside her mouth, so carefully shut to steady her chin, she gnawed her cheeks. Her eyes dulled. She swooped back to the table, to the almost-empty jar. She breathed hard through her nose, panting as if exerted, the tempo of her flaring nostrils surpassed only by her pulse. Her lips parted enough for Dorian to see that she was baring her teeth. She jabbed the brush into the remaining dregs of clumped paint. A single, strangled squeak escaped her.   

She didn’t spell her name. She didn’t put down initials or even her clan’s emblem. 

She made six little dots – _his_ symbol, the one she’d been taught from birth but had never understood until now. She tried to duplicate it in an opposite corner, but her fist trembled too much and the dots smudged into each other. Both attempts looked more like teeth marks – a bite, a wound, a disfigurement. She stared at her mistake. She squinted. Her face paled as she dropped the brush.

Dorian barely caught her as she crumpled to the floor.  

**Author's Note:**

> Drama much? XD


End file.
